Veteran UHS Spanish teacher retiring

Retiring Spanish teacher Sandra Franco

Sandra Franco has been a Spanish teacher at University High School for 23 years. Next year, however, you won’t see her on campus. When the academic calendar takes its final breath of hot desert air next week, it will mark the end of a career in the UHS community that Franco says has brought her “great satisfaction.” While at our school, Franco has taught various levels of Spanish, including A.P. Spanish Language and A.P. Spanish Literature. The most challenging part of her job, she said, is “making sure that my lesson plans are just right so that classes run smoothly,” something that is “a little tougher with the A.P. classes.”

Señora Franco remembers a rough start to her teaching career. “As I look back and I think about how I first started out with teaching,” she said, “I almost quit. After three years I almost quit teaching.” Perseverance pays off, however. After twenty more years of working in education, she is pleased with the results. “To look back and to feel great satisfaction, knowing that I have been able to present lessons and teach and [that] students have been able to accomplish so much… that has been the satisfaction for me.” For Franco, the rewards of her labor are also evident when she hears of the work her students pursue with their Spanish skills. “Since I’m a Mormon, (I’m LDS), [when] I hear of students going on missions to Spanish-speaking countries… that is the most important part of my teaching.”

Life in the classroom has its ups and downs, its good days and bad days. Franco can recall “lots of times when we all laughed in class, when something funny happened,” but she also remembers one incident, “at least twelve years ago,” with a student. “I was checking during a test…to make sure no one was cheating, and, when I looked at his table…there were two test papers instead of one, and I asked him why there were two papers, and he said that he had just got his friend’s paper and he was writing all the answers on her paper.”

UHS senior Emma Wohl said she appreciates how, in the A.P. language class, “I really got a sense of how I would need to use [Spanish] and in what circumstances I would need to use it in. [The class] made me want to go on with Spanish more than any other class I did.”

Now that she is retiring, Franco plans to spend more time with family, including her mother and her three grandchildren. She also intends to continue with College Board A.P. workshops. As she prepares to leave UHS, we thank her for all her time and effort she has put in to the Spanish program and the school as a whole.

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